Inter arma enim silent leges

“In times of war, the law falls silent.” – Cicero, 52 BCE.

Welcome to interarma.org, a nascent technology collective that is focused on sharing technical knowledge and tools with activist, advocacy and NGO communities, both online and through face-to-face workshops.

This project originally came about as a way to generalise and share some of the technical work done by members of an activist group in Perth, Western Australia. However, as alluded to by its name, interarma.org also hopes to support other groups by providing them with the knowledge and tools to better document the actions, transgressions and omissions of governments, corporations and lobbyists.

We are still very much in our early days, but if you're interested in getting involved — either as an end-user by providing feedback on our systems or as someone from a technical background who'd like to help set up an technology collective — we'd love to hear from you.

Latest Posts

Apologies for the brevity of this post. Hopefully I'll come back and develop it further in the not-too-distant future, but for now I'm using it as a pointer to the presentation I'm going to give at Perth's first hacker con, WAHCKon 2013. Well, that, and some of the groups and links mentioned in the presentation.

In conjunction with the Refugee Rights Network, we've released an early beta version of a reporting and aggregation site focused on incidents and abuses affecting refugees caught within Australia's immigration detention system. The system itself is based upon the Ushahidi Platform.

We're currently refining the incident categories and which details we should capture, but if you want to check it out, it is now live at http://watch.refugee-rights.net. And if you want to get involved and/or provide feedback, that'd be even better!

The first public release of the GroupWiki documentation tool is now available for download and installation here. This distribution is based on a system that has been used (and refined) over a couple of years by a local grass-roots political group, but should be useful to most self-organising collectives and smaller organisations.